Nokia revealed its first Windows Mobile handset this week, giving a select crowd a glimpse of the Mango phone in action.
Nokia CEO Stephen Elop made the presentation to the audience who were asked to put away cameras in anticipation of being shown something hugely confidential. Rules are made to be broken, though, and a …

COMMENTS

Lamest "leak" ever

And no WP7 buttons on the front of the N9 body, which could just be an older N9 prototype with a camera button and different camera placement.

All in all it looks like a rushed effort by Elop to steal some N9 thunder, and demonstrates that the guy really doesn't want one of his own products to succeed at any costs - what kind of CEO does that?

Customisation

Too much effort, major change to MS UI design aesthetic

I've never seen a Mango demonstration that doesn't include the buttons. Redeveloping the Mango UI at this stage to remove the three buttons (which would need to be re-implemented with gestures) would seem a huge amount of work for very little gain.

The big deal for Microsoft is having Search (Bing) front and center, and the Start button takes you home... how would they re-implement these shortcuts with gestures - maybe in the same way they have with the N9, which would work for Home and back but probably not Search.It would require a considerable amount of UI framework redevelopment just to support one device (admittedly from Microsoft's new BFF) and I don't see Microsoft allowing that.

And seriously, I mean it, no cameras! I shouldn't even be telling you this!

I think it was probably a case of 'and you mustn't post this to your blogs guys' with a little pause while everyone got their camera phones out. And why not, Nokia could do with a bit of positive press for a change.

Indeed

Considering the "leak" mostly comprises a stream from the event's projector cam, edited in with footage taken from a tripod-mounted camera at the back of the room, I'm definitely filing this one under "planned".

What camera out?

The video contains properly edited demo footage.

This is astroturfing, not a leak.

In any case, I do not see anything to make me particularly excited.

At this point in time in order to be anything Nokia has to pull out an iPhone/Arc killer out of its sleeve. This one is not a bad phone, but it is nowhere near being an iPhone killer. It is an also-run which is not good enough.

re: omg no

Can I ask which Nokia you had? I appreciate they make mistakes, but a large number of their phones seem to me marvellous unbreakable (and once considered v intuitive) warhorses, with call clarity and battery runtime like nothing else. My E61 is going strong after five years of daily use.

Meh

Malware

"Am i wrong for thinking that having Windows Phone 7 on a Nokia sullys the Windows Phone 7 brand?"

Malware sullied the whole Windows brand years ago. Nokia phones have always been very well built, their software sucked, but the the hardware was ... hard.

e.g. the £15 Nokia I bought my mother 3 years ago is still going strong with no signs of wear - that was to replace her Nokia 3210 whose only fault was a dead battery - the £15 phone was about the same cost as the replacement battery with shipping.

I would really like to see an Android Nokia phone - that would tempt me.

re Malware

My mum too had a Nokia 3210 until a year ago! It got handed around the family for about 10 years - fantastic phone! It still works but Nokia won't make any more batteries! They *know* they make these things like 1950s washing machines - rock hard.

null

The video was made professionally, but for internal consumption and available to all employees, (and contractors) . Most big internal town hall meetings in Nokia are distributed like this. It will have been on their intranet for all employees to view, and it would have been easy for one of the disgruntled soon to be ex-Nokia Symbian developers to rip it and post it.

If they wanted to deliberately 'leak' info on this there are a vast number of more interesting and more headline grabbing ways to do it.

There is a very good argument for saying if they really want to keep things secret in future, they should just have closed room screenings at their sites round the world and not use the intranet at all. That however would need a change in their culture.

Leak?

Presumably

Elop knew that everyone would be snapping away so this is an intentional leak....bit like being in government.

As to the phone - I wonder who makes it, because I doubt Nokia could have knocked it together in the time they had available, given their usual development schedules. And of course, if Nokia didn't make it then it will be crap at making calls, full of bugs (I know there are bugs in Nokia phones, but they do do much more testing than most other manufacturers), have a terrible camera, and have a battery life measure in minutes.

I doubt they've got anything running WP7 yet

The still frame in the article could be of a video running on MeeGo/N9 showing the WP7 UI - that kind of trick has been done before, many a time.

Interesting how the still frame is also cropped at the bottom so that it doesn't show the three hardware buttons (Back, Start, Search) that all WP7 phones are supposed to have yet are clearly not present on a standard N9 and there's no room to squeeze them in without shrinking the display.

All you see in the "leaked" video is an N9-type body with an extra camera button - you don't see WP7 running on an N9-type device, the demo of Mango is shown running on an emulator.

It wouldn't be beyond the whit of man to assume Nokia had some old variants on the N9 design lying around and chose one to demonstrate as an example of what's coming for WP7, seeing as how well the N9 design went down, and also to pour some water on that fire.

Seriously, this "leaked" video demonstrates nothing with regard to their WP7 accomplishments - it just comes across as a tragic attempt by Nokia to dampen any enthusiasm for their own latest product, N9/MeeGo.

PR spin

Obviously the PR people saw all the comments from people hating on Elop for effectively killing meego after they launched the N9 the other day and decided they needed to prove how wonderful the Nokia wp7 experience will be.

oohh...it's a shiny zune

Fake 'leak'

The video must be a fake leak. It's from multiple points of view. It was most likely uploaded from Elops own iPad.

Nokia shares went up 6% on release of the N9. Today we have a candid interview with Elop all but telling consumers to stay away from the N9 and this 'leaked' video. The shares fall back again...

He's a real pro, for sure. Can we have an avatar for Elop as a hollow wooden horse with little Ballamers inside waiting to spill out? Or at least one where one half of the face is Ballamer and the other is Elop?

also..

yay

huzzah, nokia has lost any competitive edge it has over its competitors.

Welcome to be yet another WP7 oem.

The delicious irony here is that Elop said himself that all Nokia R&D was concerned with for years was how high a megapixel camera they could put in their phones, and that he wanted to move away from that. Now the only way nokia is going to distinguish itself as a WP7 vendor is by how high a megapixel camera they put in their phones.

The browser as on the desktop

Oh great, pity the user interface is completely different. Oh, it's IE9 which can do a bit of HTML5 (limited video support, no SVG animation, poor canvas, etc.) but is already outdated and outclassed by almost all other mobile browsers and as it's not cross platform no chance of synching bookmarks, etc.

Hardware looks okay but then it looks like just another windows mobile. Unless MS decides it's worth pissing off the other suppliers by giving Nokia exclusive access to feature it's got less room for differentiation than on Android. And if MS does decide it's worth pissing off other suppliers, it's easy to imagine how that might affect their other channels - the only OS running on quad core ARM netbooks at Christmas will be Android. Well, presumably some people will put Ubuntu on theirs.

I don't get Nokia

They just about get a good Symbian touchscreen phone out (the N8) and then they show us all the excellent N9, but they somehow think their future is with Windows Phone?! Maybe it is, but no-one I know wants one (but a few would like an N9!)

You are right...

Elop really is a trojan horse

Right at the start of his speech, he dooms potential sales of the MeGoo handset.

Basically saying MeGoo is dead but that there's all this other "innovation" that will live on.

What unbelievable disregard for potential buyers of the N9.

And then the whole Mango demo, there's not one thing that's actually new. Google has been face-recognizing my pictures forever. I dislike face recognition... We all know what that kind of stuff will be used for when the next extremist government comes along.

Two of the most successful smartphone makers make phones with more than one operating system. Nokia should do the same, but better: Just make one phone model, get both Windphone and MeGoo to run on it - done. Waste of money to make different models every time. Just maximize your sales opportunities per development dollar. Offer the same phones you saw fit to develop for both Windphone and MeGoo, a low end a mid range and a high end one as basics, then add whatever niche products you think you need.

If Nokia's board lets Elop put all eggs into a single basket, they must be tired of their jobs. There are enough people around the world that will never buy a phone with an M$ operating system, but that would buy MeGoo today and continue to buy it in the future, if Nokia just assures them there will be future MeGoo phones...

But as Elop is obviously biased towards throwing out the baby with the bath, I consider him a trojan horse.

Elop...

Sony and Ericsson did it, so perhaps Nokia and Microsoft can.

Sony and Ericsson have managed to produce some decent 'phones, at the forefront of mobile phone photography with Carl Zeiss lenses and Xenon flashes. And now with the Androids and Playstation versions.

Motorola, one of the earliest entrants into the mobile phone industry, has gone through perhaps a phase of phones that weren't favourite, but have bounced back with the Atrix, Milestone and the Defy for example.

So what about Nokia and Microsoft, they could emulate this success. Given that Nokia have the hardware knowhow to build in some of the best cameras into phones. And Microsoft and a mobile XBOX edition (as hinted in another's post http://forums.reghardware.com/post/1102247 )

Actually

Although Nokia do have a lot of experience at putting cameras in phones, a lot of the work is actually done by their third party suppliers (the people who supply the camera interface and processing hardware on the GPU). Look up the GPU in the N8 for example. to find out where a lot of the work is done.